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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29548659">Connections</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elsey8/pseuds/Elsey8'>Elsey8</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Persona 5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Affection, Character Study, Fluff, Hands Appreciation, M/M, Platonic Relationships, thats it really its just a character study with hands</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-15 20:08:56</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,642</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29548659</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elsey8/pseuds/Elsey8</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Akira was always told eyes are the window to the soul, but now he knows hands hold so much story in them.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Akechi Goro/Kurusu Akira, Akechi Goro/Persona 5 Protagonist, Persona 5 Protagonist &amp; Phantom Thieves of Hearts</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>80</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Connections</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>It’s not as if Akira never had friends. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>There were people back in his hometown who talked to him, people he spent time with and a few he dated on and off through the years.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He made connections, he cared about people. Maybe his parents weren’t around much but at least he was provided for. He had the bare minimum. Maybe a little more than that. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>And Akira was...fine. Just fine, he managed with the tools he had and he tried not to complain much about it. Everyone’s lives are different, and that’s just how his life was. He never really minded it, he never really wanted more than he had. He was content with his situation. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>But after his arrest, everything changed. He has to start over, completely over. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He loses the friends he had, and his parents...well he may as well not be their son. He realizes, for the first time, how flimsy his connections were. They didn’t even need too much force to cut themselves loose from them, a gentle tug was more than enough to leave him completely alone. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He learns a lot about himself by moving to Tokyo, he changes himself a lot and mostly for the better. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>But there’s this one thing. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>His hands have always been something he’s proud of. When he was young they always were a thing he was complimented on. He likes to keep his nails trimmed and neat, and he was always told his hands were meant for piano, long and dextrous as they are. His parents got him a few lessons before forgetting about it. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He ended up letting it go even though the feeling of his hands moving across the instrument hypnotized him. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>When he got old enough, he had to learn how to cook for himself. Over the years that has led to a permanent callus at the base of his forefinger from the way he held knives, the burns littering his hands from various mishaps, and the scars from every mark he’s ever cut into his hands while slicing things. He’s always been rather clumsy, and cooking makes his hands unbelievably rough. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He tries to keep otherwise good care of his hands, it’s a little point of pride for him he likes holding onto. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He always regretted ruining them with the responsibilities he ended up with. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He ends up using that same dexterity which had him writing essays into the early hours of the morning beating due dates to create infiltration tools. Wraps palms that used to curl around basketballs and volleyballs and any other sport his parents wanted him to do around coffee mugs. He trades wanting to go back to playing piano to playing just as beautifully across boards of shogi and chess. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Then there’s the others, and the way they change the way even he sees something as simple as hands. His have always been something he likes because of the look of them, because they’re useful, because they’re something that have always been complimented. When he ruined them with scarring, he figured there was nothing to be done for it. The best he had was keeping them neat as he could and leaving it there. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>But then Ryuji just wants to hold hands, and he doesn’t have a reason for that. Akira’s hands aren’t soft like they used to be, it slows them both down, it leaves them down a hand each, it sometimes gets them weird looks and whispers as they pass by. It should do nothing for them, there shouldn’t be a reason for it, but...they do anyway. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Ryuji’s own hands aren’t too rough. Akira thought it would be at first, but then he started noticing that Ryuji focuses mostly on exercising his legs. He doesn’t do any weight lifting, doesn’t put the pressure on his hands that would leave them anything but fairly smooth and soft. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Ryuji never cares, he swings their hands between them like it’s nothing, like it doesn’t mean everything to Akira.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>And still, when Akira takes a long written exam and ends up with his hands cramping so severely he can barely move them… </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Ryuji walks him through a few different hand stretches until the tension fades slightly from it. Enough for him to move it properly again, at least. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Where did you learn all these stretches?” Akira had asked. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Huh? Well you do a lot with yours, so I figured you’d end up straining them. Thought I’d save you the trouble.” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Just like that. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Akira has slowly lost his pride in his hands since they’ve toughened up. But there’s something about the way Ryuji holds him, so solid, and tells him that he’s </span>
  <em>
    <span>strong. </span>
  </em>
  <span>Gives him that support so easily. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Akira used to think there was strong and then there was delicate. Strength is physical, it is unfaltering, unrelenting and sure. Delicacy is gentle, it breaks, it is feminine and beautiful. They were each what they were, and there were no crossing lines within it. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>And then Ryuji holds delicacy in his hands and calls it strong. He looks at the callouses and runs his fingers over them gently. It is a contradiction of things Akira was sure his entire life were </span>
  <em>
    <span>absolute</span>
  </em>
  <span>. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Morgana pretends he hates when Akira pets him, and yet he leans into each touch like he’ll never get another one. Sometimes it helps Akira to give himself something mindless like that to do, and sometimes it’s just relaxing to do. Morgana may insist he isn’t a cat, but regardless being that close to someone he cares about makes him happy. The proximity makes him calm when he’s otherwise overwhelmed. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I can’t sleep.” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>And Morgana had looked at him, slightly annoyed. But he’d helped anyway, like he already knew what would help him. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Morgana will just lay on his chest, and pretend to be asleep while Akira scrolls through his phone and pets over his head and back, then over again. A repeating motion that helps Akira get tired on the days his mind is going too fast, when he can’t get to sleep no matter how hard he tries. He doesn’t need to ask, Morgana can always tell when he needs it. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He purrs sometimes under the petting, leaning slightly into it “unconsciously”, and just makes that surprised noise when Akira kisses the top of his head. But he never complains about it, not when Akira genuinely needs it. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Ann is even more gentle in the way she cares for him. She will hold one of his hands in both of hers and paint his nails so carefully. Sometimes she will kiss the inside of his palm when she’s done, making him promise each time to be careful not to smudge it before it dries. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>It all started with something he didn’t even think about. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I wish I could paint my nails like girls do. It looks like it would be nice,” he’d sighed in the middle of lunch.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Ann didn’t say anything to him, she just took nail polish directly out of her bag and started painting his nails for him, then and there.  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Usually she’ll paint them black, like that first time, and he likes keeping them that way. He thinks it matches with the things he normally wears, and it’s subtle enough that not everyone notices. Still, whenever she asks if she can experiment with different patterns, he can’t help but say yes. His favorite is when she managed a little red Phantom Thieves logo on his middle finger and told him to flip off everyone with style. Of course, that’s what he did all day with them. Including her, which led to her painting over it the next day and painting it on a different finger. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Yusuke’s hands are a lot like Akira’s, long fingers and slender as a whole. Sometimes Akira likes to hold hands with him just to feel the way they link together so familiarly, almost like clasping his hands together. Yet the differences between them are staggering, Yusuke’s palms are tougher where the sides of Akira’s fingers have the same roughness. Yusuke’s hands are always paint stained, and Akira’s are always sporting some new injury. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Akira uses his hands a lot, making infiltration tools especially makes his hands cramp terribly. Yusuke shares the problem, his hands getting tired when he spends hours painting without breaks. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Sometimes they’ll sit with one another in complete silence and massage out the pains. It is an affection shared between them, unique and private to them alone. When they first started it, neither of them knew how to properly massage hands. Akira learned from Kawakami, and he taught Yusuke, and now it’s just something they do whenever they notice the other is having pains. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Makoto is motherly in the way she tries to take care of him. She rarely initiates any physical contact, but she still forces the best hand creams on him and tells him he has to take care of his skin properly. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>She always gets defensive when he tries to ask why she does it. She likes to come up with so many reasons, like that he needs his hands to be in good shape for making tools and fighting in the Metaverse...although there’s no sense in that. Ryuji tells him all the time that she just fusses like that, especially with the two of them. Apparently she’s always looking for things for Ryuji’s leg too. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He knows the real reason. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I hate when my hands are dry,” he complained. “But I can never find good moisturizer for my skin.” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“That’s unfortunate.” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>At the time, he wasn’t even sure that she'd heard what he said, and yet the next day she came to school with no less than five brands for him to try. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Futaba is more a full body person, she will completely press herself to his side and stay there. She likes to “huddle together for warmth” and that leads more often than not to some contact like that. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Then there’s the fact that she loves to hold hands in public, like she’s scared to lose him in crowds. They’ll walk around like that, as casually as he and Ryuji do. There’s a part of it that feels different, though, in a way Akira can’t explain. She seems shy with it sometimes, like she isn’t sure she’s allowed to. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You know...it’s really okay if you want to hold hands,” he told her. “I don’t mind leading you.” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Thank you.” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>She’s started doing it even more often, always swinging their hands together and pulling him ahead or letting him drag her behind. There is just a certain thing about it that feels...familial. It reminds him of when he was still small enough that he </span>
  <em>
    <span>needed </span>
  </em>
  <span>his parents to hold his hand. He doesn’t think either of them need this, but it’s still something they do. It’s something Akira wants anyway. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Haru is the gentlest with her touches. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>It’s almost ironic, since her hands are tough, and sometimes dried out depending on the time of day. If she’s just finished taking care of her garden, her hands will be dried up from touching the wet soil, and she always seems to be sporting a new injury from her plants. Her hands are the roughest out of everyone’s. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Still, </span>
  <em>
    <span>she </span>
  </em>
  <span>is gentle. She kisses every mark on his hands and cradles them in her own like it’s as precious as her passion. She holds his hands the same way she cups sproutlings. It’s something she’s done since the beginning, and the affection has only ramped up. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You don’t have to...do any of this. I don’t deserve all of this,” he’d insisted. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>And she’d only gotten more intense with it. Kissed his fingertips, held his hands and guided him in caring for her plants. In turn, he’d guided her hands in making coffee. They both just laughed when they messed up with one another. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Sumire is shy with her own touch at first, but even she settles into the casual affection. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You know, I’ll never turn down hand holding,” he joked with her. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>And when finally she slipped her hand into his, he’d been...sort of stunned. He could feel the way gymnastics affected her hands, the toughness concentrated in her palms, at the base of each of her fingers. More often than not there’s a callous somewhere on her hands, and he’s more than happy to soothe his own hand over it or sometimes help her bandage up her hands. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Goro is the roughest with his touches, on the other hand. He’s unapologetic in wanting to grab and hold on, once there’s nothing else standing between them there’s no reason not to give in to that. Goro’s hands are rather soft, and Akira wonders if the gloves shielded them from much damage. But he’s always been rough around the edges, and that’s something Akira loves about him. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>When Akira washes dishes for so long his hands get dry, Goro holds them and rubs the expensive cream Makoto gets him into them with so much force it almost hurts. Ever since November, Akira’s had less feeling in his hands, more trouble moving them. He feels like his dexterity took a hit, like he can’t quite do everything as well as he used to be able to. Sometimes the only thing that keeps him going is Goro’s hands laying atop his to guide them. Goro has become versed in how to care for him, from the types of massages that get rid of the stiffness, to the positions that lessen the pain the most on the days nothing else helps. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Ryuji’s stretches also help. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>It always helps when Goro’s lips find his knuckles, trail to his face and lips and assure him his worth is in his entirety. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Goro never sweetens his touches, he’s never gentle in any way he doesn’t have to be. He offers care in the purest sense of it, he does exactly what helps. No more, no less. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Akira used to see his hands as their own tool, as something separate from him and precious. He took pride in them when he could, and he loved the compliments he got because of them. He thought they were pretty, he thought it was one of his few good traits. When he’d needed to start cooking, he felt like the marks he got from that ruined them. He thought the appeal was gone. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>And yet the people around him have only ever treated them as an extension of him. Something beautiful connected to him, to be cared for like he’s worth that much. The more it’s given to him, the more he feels he </span>
  <em>
    <span>does </span>
  </em>
  <span>deserve it. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He’s learned a lot about hands, about people, about himself. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Akira has always been told eyes are the window to the soul, eyes are a big trait, eyes are so important. He learned to read people’s expressions from their eyes, but now…</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He knows how much story is in hands. He has a cook's hands, the position of the scars and calluses make it obvious. Yusuke’s hands are painter's hands, the palms rough from paintbrushes and contant stains. Haru has gardening hands, dry and rough. Sumire’s hands are so obviously from gymnastics, easily read in her palms. Ryuji has normally scarred ones, and Makoto’s are overly moisturized. Ann and Goro have hands that could be a model’s, and Ann’s are. Morgana’s paws are always cool when they press against his face. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>His hands are read and treasured as much as he does for the others, and in a way he feels like that care sums up a lot of his connections now. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>These connections he has now are as solid and warm as it feels to hold hands with each of them. </span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>If you liked this, feel free to come talk to me on <a href="https://twitter.com/Elsey_8">Twitter</a><br/>(and thank you lena for the brainworms)</p></blockquote></div></div>
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